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The Amazing Shrinking Supercomputer

Posted by Hemos on from the i-hide-him-in-my-pocket dept.

mE123 writes "It would seem that IBM is trying to change what we all think of as super computers. Their new Blue Gene family of super computers is meant to be 6 times faster, consume 1/15 of the power and be 1/10 the size of current models. The prototype is already number 73 (with 2 teraflops) on the list of the most powerful super computers and it's only "roughly the size of a 30-inch television". They are hoping to be able to make it up to 360 Teraflops using only 64 racks." We covered this a bit earlier, but without the level of details.

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Priorities.. by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Should the priority be making faster supercomputers (but large) or smaller supercomputers (but the same speed)? This one seems to be a step in both directions, but I wonder if they're sacrificing speed for size (or vice-versa).

  2. Scale and costs by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, how long will it be before these become commoditised for sme's ?

    Something that fits into the space of a 30" TV set (how about dimensions, guys ?) is presumably about half to 1/3 a standard rack in a co-lo. 2 Teraflops of processing power ought to be able to comfortably shift the bottleneck to the bandwidth, even for database-orientated sites ...

    I think people's cost expectations are going to be significantly impacted by the size of this - if it's small, it must be cheap, right ? (wrong, but try telling them...)

    Fantastic acheivement, btw, kudos to the man in blue :-)

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  3. Small = Dense = More power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work on the project.

    We're packing 1024 compute nodes (each node having two CPU cores) into a rack. The nodes are small and based on the PowerPC 440, with beefed up floating point. It has to be air cooled - water is a PITA.

    The finished machine will still be quite large - 64 racks with miles of cables. And that doesn't count disk drives. There isn't a single disk drive on the thing - the customer provides the filesystem, which will also be another beefy set of machines. It requires a new building.

    The machine featured in the article is just half a rack. It is still respectable, coming in at #73 on top500.org. Might be quite useful for business and small scale scientific in it's current form. (This is far more than my alma matter had access too.)